Whose Fault Is This?

In the past three days, I've been in India, Singapore, Malaysia, and Cambodia. Somewhere in those three days, I've picked up a nasty cold, which has, strangely enough, spread to my eye; in addition to a runny nose, cough, and persistent headache, I now have a symptom I've never experienced before: I can't see out of my right eye because it's covered in pus. The poor Duke has already suffered in-detail descriptions and displays of this probable pink eye, which I find strangely fascinating as well as disgusting, but now, upon realizing that I have a whole wide audience upon which to inflict my pain, I will tell you all this: I can see, and feel, the pus filming over my eyeball and congealing in the corners. When I wipe it away, it looks, and feels, just like snot--watery, greenish-yellow lumps. It's like my eye noticed that my nose was running and wanted to join the fun. It is so. freaking. disgusting. And, let me tell you, wonders of the world are slightly less, well, wondrous, when you have to keep blowing your eye so you can actually see them.

I blame India. I usually do.

Everybody Poops

My friend arrived thirty minutes late to our appointment. "I'm sorry," he said, hopping off his motorcycle. "I had an accident on the way."

"What?" I started freaking out. This is what comes of riding motorcycles, after all. "What happened? Are you okay? Was anyone seriously hurt?"

"Oh, no, no," he said. "Not that kind of accident."

"What do you mean?" Now I was confused.

"Well," he said, "I was riding along, and then I felt like I had to pass gas. So I did. But then it turned out it wasn't gas!" He started laughing his head off at this point. "It was a total mess! I mean, all over the seat, and even some on the road. I had to go home and clean it off and change my clothes and everything. That's why I'm late."

What was I supposed to say here? I just kind of stared at him, wondered if I had misunderstood the story, muttered something about "how embarrassing that must have been for you," and climbed on the back of his motorcycle like I was supposed to. I just hope thirty minutes was enough time to clean it off well.

An Open Invitation

I have two fixed plans.

Fixed Plan the First: On May 28, I will depart from Jakarta and fly to Delhi for the high school graduation of Brother #1, a.k.a. Hairlessmano.

Fixed Plan the Second: On June 28, I will depart from Singapore and fly, through Tokyo, to San Francisco.

The more perceptive among you may have furiously calculated dates in your heads and
noticed that these two Fixed Plans are exactly a month apart. These same perspicacious folks may then have concluded that I have no Fixed Plans for that month, which is, more or less, June.

Correct! I will go to graduation, of course, which I will hopefully enjoy more than my own high school graduation, where I started and finished Oscar Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray during the course of the ceremony, and I will probably spend a few days pretending to help my family pack up and move, and my mom's throwing around some crazy talk about hiking in Nepal, but nothing is set in stone.

So here is where you all, dear readers, can help. I would like, during that time, to travel Southeast Asia. I have a tentative agreement to go with SWMNB(B)N, but since I have family obligations first, things may not quite work out. While I'm quite brave/stupid enough to take on a solo tour of Southeast Asia, I, like misery, would love company. So, if anyone is free this June, and has a couple thousand dollars they'd like to spend riding crowded buses, sleeping in dirty, dilapidated homestays, and emptying the contents of their intestines over squat toilets, please, come join me! (Oh, and we might also see some ancient temples, interesting cultures, and beautiful scenery. But surely all that is just the icing on the Lonely Planet-style travel cake.) The places on my list, so far, are Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia, but I'm entirely open to suggestions.

If you're interested, you can contact me at any of my four active email addresses you happen to know. Or you could message me through Facebook or BB, or you could post a comment on this blog, or you could call me, if you, like half the male population of Indonesia, have my cell phone number and care to use it. I guess you could also try sending a message in a bottle, or lighting flares, or designing a semaphore or Morse code message, but I can't guarantee those will be successful. This offer is not limited to those I know in real life, although all those Egyptians who have reached my blog by Googling "swingers AND homestays" are, sad to say, exempt from this invitation. I will also require some sort of reassurance that you are not a) certifiably insane, b) afflicted with any contagious diseases, c) flat broke and expecting me to pay for souvenirs, or d) incredibly irritating. These aren't tough criteria to meet, I don't think, so please! Come join me in Southeast Asia! Your intestines will never be the same again.

Terrible! Horrible! No Good! Very Bad!

Everything was fine when I woke up this morning. I was a little sleepy, but that's normal. I fell asleep at my desk during first period, which I usually hate doing, because then I wake up covered in drool and with large red spots, and sometimes even the outline of a book's spine, on my face and arms, with all the teachers staring at me and then, later, feeling free to ask me a million times if I'm still sleepy: "Ngantuk? Ngantuk? Ngantuk?"

But then, somewhere around third period, I got sick. I had to dash to the bathroom during two of my classes, leaving the students happily "writing dialogues," which, without constant teacher supervision, was probably closer to "running around wildly and/or texting friends in other classes." In between classes, I dozed in the school nurse's office, and eventually I just skipped my last class, unable to pull myself off the cot where I had been curled up in stomach pain for the last hour. In the hour that followed the end of school, I cancelled plans with a friend, two months in the making, that I was actually looking forward to; forgot the motorcycle helmet I borrowed from the servants at school; dragged myself, in a pained and almost crouching way, through the roughly 100 students on the school bus to take my seat in the front; spent half an hour on the bus trying not to think about how sick I felt; after said half hour, threw up out the window of the bus, while it was moving, in front of all those students, and, what's more, at the busiest intersection in town; stumbled off the bus to throw up several more times into a potted plant by the side of the road; didn't look where I was going and so got hit on the top of the head by one of those bars that raise and lower to admit cars to a parking lot*; and, finally, standing in the lobby of the second swankiest hotel in town, with one hand clutching the enormous swollen lump on my head and the other covered in my own vomit, broke down sobbing.

Things got a little better after that. I came home, changed into my houseclothes, a nightie covered in frogs and the slogan "Toadily Cool," which I paid $6 for because I couldn't resist the pun, and turned on a movie. After crying my way through "Mystic River," I fell asleep for about five hours**, and somehow got the energy to eat some white rice and head to the internet cafe.

So yeah. Today was um, not great. I don't think even Alexander can compete***.

*to make this even more embarrassing, or maybe just more infuriating, the bar wasn't automatic. You'd think the operator could have, I don't know, raised it when he saw me coming.
**throwing up really takes it out of you. Ha!
***to be honest, I haven't read the book since I was really little. Maybe he can. But before you decide, you should see the size of the bump on my head.

Retreat From Sanity

I just spent the last one (hellish) night and two (surreal) days on a "rededikasi spirituel" retreat for all the teachers (middle school and high school) at my school. While I love all these people dearly--really I do--this love seems to hinge as much on my ability to retreat (get it?) from their combined presence for an occasional breather, or at the very least an occasional ten-minute stretch without someone, usually proxying for a wandering fruit saleswoman, asking me if I like avocados.

(It's not very Christlike, I know. But I like to think even Christ might have whipped out his trademark sarcasm at that point--a little bit of "render these avocados," if you know what I mean. Then again, that thought is probably just proof of how little "rededikasi" my spirit really got.)

While the retreat had its high points--like when I accidentally got locked into the conference room during our lunch hour and had to escape by climbing out of a window--my general opinion on it is probably best summarized by my first thought upon waking up this morning: "Please don't speak Javanese. Please, please, please don't speak Javanese. I can't take another second of not understanding what's going on. Please...oh, sialan."

This whole language thing was the main problem, see: I love everyone dearly on an individual basis, where I can persuade them to stick to Indonesian, and to repeat things when necessary, so that we can actually talk. When everyone gets together, though, they switch into raucous Javanese from which I can only catch basic words like "Miss Hannah," "does," "not," "like," and "avocados." This means I'm completely left out of the fun bits of every conversation, which, by definition, is no fun.

Moreover, I was left out of the fun bits of our spiritual rededication. We had about ten hours, all told, of what were basically church talks with PowerPoint. This being a mainstream (and sometimes charismatic) Protestant school, most of the speakers were professional preachers and therefore reasonably talented. (Although, to my Mormon mind, used to a lay clergy, this also made them vaguely slimy and not to be trusted. Plus, it's triply disappointing when a professional's talk resorts to "it was then that I carried you." For heaven's sake, man, you're paid to do this! You really couldn't come up with anything better?) However, since they liberally made use of Javanese to keep their audience entertained, their talks, to me, sounded something like this: "And we need to REDEDICATE ourselves to the LORD! As my grandmother used to tell me...blo blo blo londo goble goble songo lungo siji loro!" [Hearty laughter from the audience, with the exception of Miss Hannah, who is thinking of trying to choke herself to death on the nearest avocado.]

And of course, I had to concentrate ridiculously hard to even understand the speakers' Indonesian, so after an hour or two (out of ten, mind you) I ended up with a headache. When I tried to kill my headache (and my sore throat and runny nose and cough and aching stomach--did I mention I was sick with a cold through all of this?) by going to bed early, I found that my two roommates wanted to watch TV until one in the morning. (They were possibly celebrating the fact that we got to wake up "not too early in the morning," which the retreat coordinator apparently defined as "in time for a mandatory 6 AM exercise session.") And then my host mother arrived and brought two of the maids, which excited everyone because the maids could take care of me, which was terrible because hello? I spend all my time trying to persuade them not to take care of me. And on the way home, we had to stop to buy oleh-oleh, or edible souvenirs, where I then had to explain to an estimated fifteen people, in the space of five minutes, why I was not buying anything. (No, I don't hate you. No, I'm not on a diet. No, I don't hate your food, with the exception of avocados. I just don't. feel. like. eating. Is that so hard to understand?) And there was no hot water at the hotel, which is fine in Semarang's 100-degree weather, but not so fun in Kopeng's breezy 75 degrees. (I ended up just faking it: going into the bathroom, splashing some water around noisily, including on my hair, and changing my shirt. Luckily, that same breezy 75 degrees guaranteed that I didn't smell too bad.) And, of course, I managed to eat something spicy just before leaving Semarang and so had to request an emergency gas station stop halfway to Kopeng, which I found hugely embarrassing, especially since it encouraged all the teachers to watch what I ate even more closely than normal, and, of course, to make plenty of snide comments about how Westerners just can't handle their chili.

So yeah. It was not, let's say, the best two days of my life. On the other hand, it's over now, and early tomorrow morning (too early, even by the retreat coordinator's standards), I get to make my own retreat (surely it's funny now?): I'm flying to west Sumatra, where, as long as I don't die in a fiery plane crash, I intend to visit beaches, jungles, lakes, and mountains, speak English with an honest-to-goodness American, buy lots of cheap silver, and not even look at a single avocado.

Home (Where My Music's Playing)

I dreaded coming back to Indonesia, I’m ashamed to say. I spent the last few days of my vacation abroad surrounded by cranberry juice, a fast internet connection, English novels, and Monty Python episodes with my brothers. How could I leave all that? My heart sank at the thought of it.

When I first returned, on the day before New Year’s, I stayed with a friend, an embassy employee in Jakarta. Her place was, for me, a sort of halfway house: cranberry juice but no fast internet, English books but no loving family. I spent my time there sleeping (one night, for a record fifteen hours), reading books (seven novels in two days, my idea of heaven), and eating American snacks from the commissary.

I came back to Semarang on Wednesday night, on a ghetto little plane (insects crawling on my seat: seven) with a ticket I had purchased for twenty dollars the day before. I spent the flight planning my lessons for Thursday and Friday only to discover, when I landed to a flurry of text messages from my school, that the students had testing on Thursday and I didn’t have to teach. Fine, I thought, another day in the sun, reading novels and finishing my grad school reapplication. Friday morning, I woke up bright and early (or, at the very least, early, since the sun isn’t quite up at 5 A.M.) and headed in to school, only to find out that testing extended to Friday and therefore I still didn’t have to teach. No one told me because, as my favorite teacher put it, they missed me. It was rather sweet, really, except that it meant I wasted an entire week in Jakarta and Semarang that I could have spent in Bali. (I forgive them. See what I sucker I am for people who miss me?)

Now that I’m actually back, I am, to my surprise most of all, glad to be here. Between a church activity where I was greeted, loudly and enthusiastically, by the missionaries, the entire Relief Society, and the children to whom I teach piano lessons; time spent exchanging vacation stories with my favorite teachers; the new Decemberists CD to obsess over; a random school trip to Kudus, two hours away, simply to tell three middle schools there that we would like to visit later in the week; and the exciting discovery that I’m suffering several of the major symptoms of pinworms, I’ve realized I really do have a life here. It may be different, sometimes to the point of surreal, it may not be what I expected, it may not even be exactly what I want when I wake up every morning, but it is my life and I’m happy with it, parasites and all.

La Nausée

5 PM: Struck by a sudden wave of nausea. I try lying down to counteract it, and spend the next hour staring at the mildew pattern on my ceiling.

6 PM: Realizing I hadn't really eaten anything all day, and connecting the dots between nausea and an empty stomach, I head out to the dining room and forced myself to eat some chicken soup.

6.30 PM: With the nausea increasing, I decide to take a nap.

7 PM: One of the maids interrupts my sleep to tell me to eat something. I told her I had already eaten, so we had the perpetual argument--"You didn't eat enough!" "Yes, I did; I think at 22 years old I know how much I want to eat."--which ended only when I, still groggy from my thirty minutes of sleep, told her I was sick and would eat more when I woke up from a nap.

9 PM: I wake up abruptly from my "nap," only to realize that I don't really have the energy to change into pajamas or brush my teeth. I roll over to try to go back to sleep.

9.30 PM: Not successful at sleeping, I finally drag myself out of bed to put on pajamas and brush my teeth. After turning on a quiet CD, I fell asleep again.

10.30 PM: Still nauseated, this time I wake up to realize that I have to throw up. Now. Dash to the bathroom to clear my body of everything I have eaten in the last 24 hours.

11.00 PM: Wake up next to the toilet, not wearing any pants. Stumble back to my bed, still without pants.

11.30 PM: Trash around my bed trying to find a cool spot in the sheets. Wonder what is making me so sick.

12.00 AM: Throw up again. Still nauseated, the thought strikes me: this must be what morning sickness feels like.

12.30 AM: Throw up again. Begin pondering ways I could possibly be pregnant.

12.31 AM: What if there was a little drop of semen on the motorcycle I rode yesterday and it leaked through my underwear and made me pregnant?

12.32 AM: That's ridiculous. I wouldn't be feeling morning sickness nearly that quickly.

12.33 AM: Bathtubs! Isn't there some urban legend about a bathtub?

12.34 AM: Or toilet seats!

12.35 AM: Realize I don't even have a bathtub. Or, for that matter, a toilet seat. Fall back asleep.

12.47 AM: Rape! Rohypnol! I could have drunk something at a party...

12.48 AM: I don't drink. Or go to parties. And wouldn't I remember waking up in some strange place? Fall back asleep.

1.01 AM: Virgin birth!

1.03 AM: My school's not going to be happy about this. They'll never believe it's a virgin birth. Try to think of how to say "virgin birth" in Indonesian, in case my principal asks.

1.04 AM: Kelahiran perawanan? Kelahiran dari perawan?

1.36 AM: Throw up again, this time with diarrhea too.

2.04 AM: Toss about in bed shouting something that I now don't remember. Someone was misunderstanding me, I think, or maybe they just wanted me to lie quietly in place, but they were wrong, wrong, wrong! How could they think such a thing?

2.37 AM: Throw up again. Decide to call in sick for school the next day.

3.17 AM: More random shouting. More tossing. More throwing up. Consider finding a bowl to throw up in from bed, and realize that I don't know where the bowls are. Curse God, and hope to die.

6.01 AM: One of the maids pops her head in, wondering if I'm going to school. I stare at her blankly, trying to find the Indonesian words for "Are you kidding me? I just expelled my intestines through my mouth and you expect me to stand in front a bunch of 17 year olds all day and lecture about debate?" Settle for "No, because I'm sick."

6.18 AM: Call my school principal to tell him I'm not coming in today.

So now I've got the day off, which I'm mostly using to lie around in bed reading Virginia Woolf's "Orlando," with the exception of a brief excursion to the internet cafe, where the cigarette of the person sitting next to me is doing nothing to help my nausea. I think I'm going to use my afternoon by returning home, climbing back into bed, watching a movie, and maybe falling asleep. A night like last night justifies a little daylight decadence, don't you think?

Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying

Or, How to Lose Five Pounds in Two Days

It's actually quite easy, and takes very little self-control; rather, a good deal of the opposite is the issue. (Ha, ha.) All that's required is picking up a very nasty case of something, Allah only knows what, that necessitates frequent trips to the bathroom for diarrhea and/or vomiting.

I'm four days into my vacation, and two days into being incredibly sick. I'm quite impressed with myself, actually, as I'd say this is about the sickest I've ever been. It's getting a little better now, but Saturday night was one of the low points of my existence, and I include the time I threw up on the ground of a train platform in Cairo with 300 Egyptians looking on. After coming home from the day's activities around 4.30 PM, I climbed straight into bed, and spend the next 16 hours throwing up--loudly, to what I'm sure was the regret of my neighbors in a hotel with paper thin walls--shaking with fever, and sleeping only intermittently due to frequent trips to the toilet to "buang air besar," or "throw out big water," if you catch my drift.

It's been a little over 48 hours now, and, surprisingly, I'm not better. With food poisoning, these things usually come and go, and one night of expelling everything I've ever put into my body is usually enough to solve the problem. Not so this time. Sunday morning I felt just as awful, and it took all I had to drag myself out of bed and into a taxi to try to get to district conference; I ended up missing it entirely, which is a pity, since that's the main reason I went to Solo. I arrived at the church just in time to ride the bus to Salatiga, my next destination; I had originally planned to stay with a friend in Salatiga, but as I was too sick to be fit for human company, I found a hotel and collapsed upon my bed there. I essentially spent all Sunday alternating between my bed and the bathroom, hoping that, with enough rest, I could defeat this thing.

And yet. I had to cancel my plans for today, going out to my friend's village to celebrate the holiday with her and her parents and her grandparents and whatever other random people might come along, in favor of lying in bed and moaning, with occasional sprints to the toilet. I also mustered up the energy to let my friend drive me to the hospital--okay, so it didn't require that much energy--where, for a mere 75 cents, a doctor listened to my stomach with a stethoscope, asked me if I had thrown up, and prescribed some medication. I'm taking the meds, but I'm not sure if I trust them--with all the numerous things that can cause diarrhea, how on earth can he know what I've got with only a 2 minute consultation? At least I didn't pay much.

In any case, I'm miserable and I want sympathy. I haven't even anything in more than 48 hours (57, to be precise), because I know I won't keep it down. (Also, I'm not hungry.) I have to be near a bathroom, because I have to, as they say, "paraphrase Bloom" roughly every half hour. I'm exhausted, despite all the rest I'm getting. My head hurts. I'm vaguely nauseated. Oh, and, worst of all, I can barely walk because my calf muscles are so cramped from dehydration. I'm valiantly trying to replace my fluid loss by drinking water, soda, Pocari Sweat, and oral rehydration salts, but since I can't keep anything down, it's not doing me much good.

What a way to spend a vacation. At least this illness has managed to undo some of the maids's efforts to fatten me up. Only two days, and my hipbones are more obvious than ever before. If this continues for much longer, I could start acting as a spokesperson for some grand new diet: totally easy! totally effective! totally free! All it takes is a small sacrifice of time, energy, and any shred of dignity you still possess.

Note to Self

Do not (NOT!) eat very spicy and possibly dirty food before embarking on a three hour car ride. Any toilet found in gas stations in central Java is bound to be squat, dark, dirty, and definitely without toilet paper. The experience will be unpleasant, from begging your host parents to ask the driver to pull over, no, not in fifteen minutes, not when we get to a more convenient place, but NOW! to having eucalyptus oil rubbed all over your back and stomach by an assiduous fifteen year old maid. Never, ever, ever again.

I Am Petra's Upset Stomach

I spent this weekend sick as a dog. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration: "sick as a relatively healthy dog" might be a better way of putting it.

In any case, those who are squeamish about stomach ailments may want to stop reading this post sometime about now. In fact, you may want to stop reading my blog for good, since I anticipate many more stomach-centered posts come the end of the summer, when I go to Indonesia.

Stomach ailments have been par for the course for me my entire life. "Par for the course" means, roughly, once a week. I've always been convinced that I picked up a nasty little parasite of some kind in Indonesia, and that, in addition to the hereditary gift of carrying stress in my stomach, has left me with perpetual stomach-related episodes. I can tell any number of amusing and completely disgusting stories: throwing up on the platform at a train station in Cairo, sneaking up and down the aisles of an airplane late at night to collect extra barf bags, spending forty-five minutes in the bathroom at the Taj Mahal, each and every time I've eaten Indian or Thai food--at this point, nearly anything can trigger a story beginning, "so this one time, I was really sick..."

(My mom has a story that can destroy all comers, though--an incident that literally knocked her socks off. And trust me when I tell you that I know the difference between "literally" and "figuratively.")

In any case, this weekend's episode--Season 21, Episode 138, "Petra vs. Pasta"--was worse than expected, and I decided to take action, in the form of a little detective work. Narrowing down the list of ingredients in the pasta, curry, and taco salad that have most recently emptied my intenstines, I have reached this conclusion: it's a food allergy.

So I'll open it up for a vote. Get your mouse-clicking fingers ready, kids: am I allergic to onions, or am I allergic to garlic?